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Mary Shen Barnidge Future productions of this play outside of the Chicago area—and there should be plenty—will likely include... ...a program note informing audiences that the Drake Hotel is the fanciest lodging-for-hire in Chicago, surpassing even the Palmer House in its historical grandeur and boasting a view of the lake on two of its sides and the fashionable shops of Michigan Avenue on its third. That its extensive celebrity clientele makes for strictly enforced security on the part of the staff. And that its upper floors are devoted to luxury suites renting for thousands of U.S. dollars per night. In short, it’s the perfect setting for a romantic comedy, even if audiences will need to use their imaginations to conjure a spacious penthouse ( with many more doors ) on the snug stage at the Victory Gardens Greenhouse. The plot involves a snowy New Year’s Eve during which a wimpish young doctor consents to marry his domineering girlfriend; a meek young librarian waits for her fiancé to assert the boldness that makes him a successful Boston D.A. and pop the question; and her meddling CPA buddy has a blind date with a divorce lawyer. Now, guess which two of these unwitting lovers share the same gender-inspecific name. Next to locked-room mysteries, screwball farce is probably the most difficult genre for writers to pull off, its airy ambience and inexorable logic demanding unrelenting attention to detail with never a squint betraying the industry expended on its architecture. Fortunately, Gregg Opelka’s extensive experience as a composer has accustomed him to tracking several melodies progressing in simultaneous counterpoint, and so we can almost hear intricate tocatta-and-fugue harmonies marking cadence under the escalating confusion as characters stumble ever more deeply into madcap misapprehension. We never lose our way, however, thanks to Suzanne Avery-Thompson’s expertise at directing/choreographing musicals and an ensemble of actors whose resumés reflect verbal agility, enabling them to maintain textual traction while swapping patter at stichomythic speed with never an utterance not wholly rooted in the information we have been provided. By the time the jacks and jills are paired off according to their respective temperaments—dormouse with dormouse, pit bull with pit bull, party animal with party animal—we are satisfied that everyone will live happily ever after for knowing exactly the road leading up to their embarkation. click here to link to the story click here to return to Marrying Terry REVIEWS main page
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